Mention of Matt in the Tucson press. Thank to Cristina for noticing it. Some day someone is going to have to get Matt orienteering again, because he's a natural.
Bicycling8:00 [1]
Saturday Mar 29
Orienteering5:30:00 [1]
Alan Young's 6 hour rogaine in Harriman. Gorgeous weather. I love Harriman.
Finally pulled together 5 people for the trivia contest and some time to register, but when I went to the registration page they were full. There are still some youth slots open though...
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Finally pulled together 5 people for the trivia contest and some time to register, but when I went to the registration page they were full. There are still some youth slots open though...
Bummer, because I just had Dave load 8 hours of science trivia cramming podcasts onto the iPod for the drive down to Harriman and back tomorrow.
Thursday Mar 27
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Stress level high... Read a news article about work bullies yesterday and this morning realize I am feeling a bit victimized - not by someone at my paid work but rather at my volunteer society work... Hopefully this will help me figure out how to respond...
Wednesday Mar 26
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From February...
Monday Mar 24
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A different February day in Tucson, with snow on the hills.
Sunday Mar 23
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We watched "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control" recently. The lion tamer said the reason for them holding a chair in one hand (there's a whip in the other as you'll recall) is that tracking the four different points of the chair legs confuses the lion and diverts its attention away from wanting to kill and eat you. So next time I do that Tucson trail run, I should bring a chair instead of a knife. (And a whip?) I wonder if it works on dogs too.
Today my stepson Caz came over and made dinner (!) - a really fine dinner. He brought along his new girlfriend, and I like her very much. They met four weeks ago at a Dr. Who party. I found out she used to do track & field in high school. I told her about orienteering and showed her a map, and she started bugging Caz about when they could go do it. Best reaction I've gotten from anyone yet, and I've explained orienteering to a lot of people. This was not the only reason I liked her.
Pine Hill map. Dave and I set some eggs in the woods for kids to find, then went on a gentle mostly on-trail exploration of Pine Hill.
DDR5:00 [3]
In the MIT student center before going to see the Shakespeare Ensemble's "Twelfth Night". The kids did some too, and my parents each did one dance! They were good! Maybe I inherited from them whatever it was that instantly drew me to Dance Dance Revolution.
The student center game room has been squeezed into a space less than half its previous size, to make room for a bank.
Harriet & Amisi making radios a couple weeks ago, from Quaker Oats boxes.
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Awesome speech by Obama today. Which he wrote himself. (Whereas the Pretender currently occupying the White House wouldn't be able to read a single one of those sentences off a teleprompter.)
Today I came across this nugget for nerds:
... In other news, today I read a bit more on how they caught Eliot S, which development has had me quite curious to see whether people cotton on to how closely They (and their algorithms) are watching us.
Something horrible happened in Central Square today. I don't know exactly what, but saw the aftermath just outside of DD - tons of police, Mass Ave closed off, detectives measuring a rear wheel of a big Shaw's truck, dark streak on the ground for many yards behind it.
Put some science podcasts on an MP3 player and listened to one on this run. It was about the AACR meeting last year, and featured the massive sequencing of kinases in lots of cancer samples. This is a good way to get out running. But I need a different route - it's too noisy around the river.
Better than 8 minutes of electric needles in the butt.
Wednesday Mar 12
Running49:00 [3]
Raining. Relatively (for me) fast clip, because of earlier procrastination. To Arlington in between meetings at work, to get my bike from Jamie's house. (Also, to work in the beginning of the day.)
I DID IT! I WENT RUNNING!!!
Bicycling24:00 [1]
Arlington to home. Wet.
Tuesday Mar 11
Bicycling33:00 [1]
Work commute, plus sunset ride to Arlington to see Suma, Nate & Jamie. Suma has recently passed her 100-day post-transplant milestone and is starting to grow some hair and have more energy and taste things again.
Monday Mar 10
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So, what have I been up to instead of exercising? There really is no good excuse, but I did pretty much pull together all the information for my taxes, which is unprecendented, as I usually don't file until quite late in the year. And I stood up to a little bullying by email (overly critical & micromanaging leader of an organization I volunteer with), so that was good. And... I read a not-so-good Orson Scott Card book late in the Ender series... OK, the excuses are getting lamer.
Saturday Mar 8
Soccer30:00 [1]
Ran Isabel's soccer practice. Participated in some of the drills.
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Watched "Dark Water Rising," a documentary about pet rescues in New Orleans in the 6 weeks following the post-Katrina flooding. We had learned a bit about the animal rescues from the Best Friends web site and a related book. But what this film showed was a lot grittier and more disturbing. 80%-90% of the 50,000-100,000 pets left behind in New Orleans died, usually horribly (drowned at the end of a rope that didn't let them stay above the water, etc.). Many of the dogs left behind were pit bulls used in dogfighting.
Friday Mar 7
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I read with interest in the New Yorker as how
When Sheila Heti, a novelist in Toronto, learned that her friend Margaux had recently dreamed about shopping for Tupperware with Hillary Clinton, she began to wonder: what if the recurrences of Presidential candidates in people's dreams were meaningful in the aggregate?
You gotta wonder how many people dream about getting a ride from Obama and talking to him about a shared interest in orienteering.
The article is awesome, and I can't resist one more quote:
"Hillary Clinton came to my apartment, smoked a bowl with me and a couple friends, then she gave me an iPhone," an Obama supporter dreamed. "We walked around Seattle for a while. I woke up with a strange feeling of satisfaction that it would be O.K. if she wins."
Watched "Life is Beautiful." Decided not to show it to the kids because I think we're getting holocaust overload. It was great. Ballsy, to find a way to make the audience laugh so much in the same movie where you see the concentration camp so explicitly. The DVD was scratched or dirty during the scene where the doctor talks to the father, so we missed what he said - I presume he was saying he couldn't do anything and complaining about the role he was forced to play. I described the movie to David this morning, and he wants to see it.
Just surfed to figure out the missing scene, and it's better (and more horrible) than I had imagined.
Saturday Mar 1
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Watched "Raise the Red Lanterns" with David & his friend Aiury. Aiury wanted to watch it; at school he'd studied the role of women in China before and after the revolution, so he was familiar with it and had seen some scenes and said it was a great movie. Boy, they really teach 7th graders a lot of stuff these days that I don't remember hearing about when I was that age. A highlight for me was watching the part where her maid discovers she's not pregnant because of blood on her pants, and Aiury explaining very matter of factly to David what is going on.
